


This is how you get a happy ending

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Game Over Timeline, Gen, aro ace John headcanon, cameos by the battleship crew and a few others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 00:16:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8599513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: I inflict my aro ace John headcanon upon the world.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm slowly reposting some of my old stuff from my tumblr. I suppose if that site ever goes under, my ignominous fic-mutterings will survive. Anyway, I had the bad luck of finishing this right around Game Over and - due to the current fandom climate - dashed off a somewhat happier replacement ending. If you'd like to see that, it's here: http://deliverusfromsburb.tumblr.com/post/101038066383/so-i-promised-an-aroace-john-fic-and-i. The version posted here is the original ending I meant it to have.

You are thirteen years old when an angry alien tells you that you have to marry one of your best friends.

Marry Rose! The idea sticks with you, interesting but potentially dangerous, like a candy bar that might have nuts. You bring it up when you can, hoping to read what your reaction should be from other people. ”Are you in love with her?” your sister asks, and you sputter. You’re too young for that - aren’t you? Thinking these things through is easier without adding in words like love. You can’t see it or touch it or put it on a computer screen. What’s the point?

The game didn’t come with instructions. Rose had her walkthrough. You cling to an alien’s words as the closest thing to orders you have. It’s familiar. Tidy, even. If a movie has four people, it usually falls out that way. Karkat is wrong about re-population, though. There are other ways. You should know. All your friends and family came from slime and the push of a button, which you think is much more interesting anyway. For now, you decide to follow Dave’s example and take his shipping chart as a joke.

It’s not as funny when you’re holding her dead body in your arms.

Jack is gone - you don’t know where. You rose out of your own blood unstained, but kneeling down coats your knees and palms in the same red that swirls and drips around you.

Your father is dead.

You can’t fix it, can’t change it, so you shove that knowledge to the back of your mind. You can save Rose. Vriska says so, anyway. She has told you to do a lot of things and also gotten you killed, but you trust her. The awkward way she says it makes it easier to believe.

Rose is heavy. Dark magic skitters over her skin and tickles your fingers like a static shock. Her head lolls to the side and your glasses clink against the earpiece that has clung determinedly to her face, but you manage to press your lips to hers. It’s only for a second, but it’s long enough for the taste of blood to force its way into your mouth. Your first kiss tastes like a spoonful of pennies.

Rose’s body is cooling, but somewhere else she's waking up - just like in a fairy tale. You can’t look at your father, not yet, but if any part of Rose’s plan works - if you can set the world right again - you’ll do things differently. You swear. There’s work to be done, so you hop into the air and let the Breeze take you where you need to go.

Things don’t happen exactly how you were expecting. You set all of space and time spinning backward, but your sister plucks you out of thin air and sets you by her side. It’s not your story anymore, but you still have a part in it. She’s not really clear on the details, so you’re not sure what part that is (and is your dad ok?) but you’re alive. You wake up the day after your birthday not knowing where you are. The ceiling is different, this isn’t your bed, and you expect to hear your dad clattering around in the kitchen making breakfast. Remembering hits you like a blade in the chest, and you curl in on yourself, hands pressed hard against your mouth to keep from crying out. It’s a few hours before you’re ready to stand.

When you’re presentable, you wander out of the barracks you claimed as your temporary bedroom. Someone is clattering around in the kitchen area. Jade scrubs at the dishes left over from your flung-together dinner last night, a manic gleam in her eye. You reach over to pick up a bowl and she snatches it from under your fingers.

“You know, you don’t have to do everything yourself,” you say, and she looks at you like you’ve started speaking Rose’s horrorterror language. After a moment, she hands you the bowl.

“I guess I forgot.”

You run it under the water - this is definitely the weirdest battleship you’ve ever seen. “When did your grandfather die?”

“A long time ago.”

You remember her cheerful messages and words of encouragement, littered with hearts and smiling faces. You never knew. “Does it stop hurting?”

She swipes a cloth down the blade of a knife. “It gets easier.”

Everyone has trouble adjusting. After you catch Davesprite looking at you funny a few times, you demand an explanation.

“It’s weird seeing you,” he says.

“Why?” You think the guy who’s bright orange with wings has the monopoly on weird. Your sister has dog ears now. If anyone can claim to be normal on this ship, it’s you.

He shrugs, a movement that goes from shoulders to wingtips to the shimmery end of his tail. “I dug your grave.”

The conversation doesn’t go much further after that.

It turns out that a roadtrip through a magical alien dimension isn’t as interesting as you’d expect. The first few weeks are ok. The three of you explore your lands, crawling through caves, teetering on spinning gears, and pillaging wrecks in the ocean’s depths. (Turns out you can hold your breath pretty much forever.) The salamanders on your planet trail after you, tugging at your clothes and proclaiming you as their hero. You appreciate this until one of them tries to sell you your underwear. Then you make a mental note to change the locks. Jade wears increasingly elaborate alchemized dresses through all of this until the bucket you carefully positioned over her door finds its mark. Then she switches into more reasonable clothing, which is a relief. It’s hard for you to keep a conversation with Davesprite going when she sweeps by wearing something sparkly. Probably the crow DNA. The battleship fills with souvenirs of your expeditions - glowing crystals, lavish tapestries, pots of flowers prized from between mossy boulders - but eventually your trips to the planets slow. You can still go swimming or crane your neck up to watch banners of colored light dance overhead, but you’ve seen what there is to see. Your denizens slumber no matter what you do to wake them, and your quests sleep with them. You spend a few hours alchemizing an enormous mustache to hang over Typheus’s toothy maw, but it’s not as funny since he won’t see it for three more years.

With the planets exhausted, you swap the contents of each other’s libraries. (After the first incident, you shake out Dave’s books for loose papers before reading. You’re not sure if that comic was an ironic joke or something his brother left there, and you don’t want to know.) You watch all your movies again, but you don’t make it through Armageddon. It’s hard to enjoy a story where meteors are coming to destroy the earth, not after almost everyone you know is dead. You turn off the television and think of your neighborhood, how much you miss the neat, boring rows of houses and the neat, boring people who lived inside them, and you even feel nostalgic for school, a little bit. Apocalypses aren’t as much fun when they happen.

More time passes. You reread old chatlogs, flicking through green and red and purple, sometimes seeing a troll and matching long ago insults to recent names. Sometimes you close your eyes hard and try to imagine what Dave and Rose are doing a universe away. You miss them. It’s not that people won’t spend time with you! They will, if you ask. It’s easier than convincing your dad to let you stay up late, even. Jade throws down her controller after you beat her at another video game and huffs “Why did I agree to this again?” but she always does. You wish you didn’t have to ask, though. You wish people would seek you out. Instead, you worry that if you stop talking you’re going to turn into the air you’re named for, transparent and ready to blow away.

Not long after turning fourteen, you walk in on your sister and Davesprite kissing.

“Gross,” you say after a moment, because you feel like you should say something, and that’s the first word that comes to mind. Davesprite flips his shades back on lightspeed-quick (if he doesn’t watch out one of these days he is going to lose an eye). Your sister’s dog ears go back and she starts spluttering about knocking, so you wave the ping pong paddles you’re holding in a sarcastic salute and go find someone else to play with. The chess person you find destroys you, but in your defense you’re not playing your best. When the ball careens past you, you wonder again whether you’re turning invisible. There’s a sour feeling heavy in your stomach, and you’re just starting to realize how lonely being one of the last handful of humans can be.

“What’s the point of all that romancey stuff?” you ask your nanna one day.

She chuckles. “Are you jealous, dear?”

“No,” you say, too loud, folding your arms. Talking to her always makes you feel childish. A kid confiding in his grandmother. Lame. “I just don’t know why.”

“I’m not sure there is a why,” she says. (Only having your grandmother to talk to is bad enough. Having a grandmother who speaks in riddles is even worse.) “It’s something humans do.”

“Something humans do,” you repeat glumly. Are you human? Jade got bored once and sequenced all your DNA, proclaiming you were all freaks and saying something about telomeres. Dog ears or no, she’s more human than you. You remember watching your own body form out of slime and stolen memories. Did something go wrong? Did you press the wrong button, bump a coordinate, let a few crucial numbers slide out of place? Are you broken? Did you break yourself?

If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re jealous. Jealous that your sister (yours) is spending so much time with someone else, that she so effortlessly picked back up a friendship that to you seems irrevocably severed, that they seem to get something you don’t without any struggle at all. They’re only a little older. That can’t be it.

One day you wander into the common room with a board game and find a planet floating a few inches above the ground with a note saying in swirly handwriting ‘be back in a few hours, call if you need me!!! <3’ This is not unusual, so you set the game up next to it and play every piece yourself. It’s not much fun, though, knowing from the beginning that part of you is going to lose. The spinner lands on eight (you think, briefly, of Vriska), and you shove the blue plastic minivan forward. “Your move,” you mutter. The planet doesn’t answer.

You try to imagine having a girlfriend, someone you can whisper to and wander off with just to show them that you’re not lonely. You entertain delicious fantasies of ignoring your sister’s calls, but the rest of the vision is half-hearted. You can’t even picture the girl’s face. You rewatch your favorite films for material, but you can’t imagine trying any of those moves on Rose, your alien-appointed matesprit. She has god powers now, and even before that you were sure she could set you on fire with a word if you annoyed her. Nor can you imagine doing any of these things with Vriska. How do you go on a date with someone who feeds people to a giant spider? And trolls have sharp teeth, you think. That might not be a problem if they stayed away from you, but you’re pretty sure kissing involves tongues eventually, which is enough to gross you out fangs or no fangs. Who comes up with this stuff? You’ll kiss a poster or act out Con Air with babies, but real life romance seems like more trouble than it’s worth. The movies seem insistent on it being important for a happy ending, though, so you study, study, study.

Your fifteenth birthday isn’t much fun. You’re really excited to show Jade how awesome Con Air is, but the longer you watch, the more it feels… off. When you see each scene come up, you remember the last time you watched this movie, when you sat next to your dad with a bowl of popcorn balanced between you. You keep looking over, expecting to see him, and when Nic Cage delivers his line you lift your hand like you’re going to high five a ghost. And it all seems so stupid all of a sudden, so childish - the movie, the cake, the party, everything. What’s the point? Why are you celebrating? Your dad is dead. He’s never coming back. He’s never watching this movie with you again. You’re stuck on this awful boat for another year, and everything is stupid and pointless and wrong.

When you find out the world is breaking, you’re not even surprised. As far as you’re concerned, it’s been breaking for a while.

When you wake up, you brush gravel off your clothes and walk back inside. Jade is eating cake again, but the movie is over. “Enjoy your nap?” she asks. There’s more of an edge to her voice than usual, and you probably deserve it, so you don’t say anything back. You also don’t mention the ring clutched in your hand, its metal slowly matching the temperature of your skin. It feels good to have a secret. It’s something that’s yours.

“Vriska’s dead,” you say later that day.

“Oh.” Jade slumps a little. “I thought so, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

“I dated her,” you say. When her eyebrows rise, you add, “Not me. Another John. A ghost from Da- from sometime else. But he’s dead now.”

“Weren’t you- wasn’t he already?” Then you have to explain Lord English, which you guess maybe you should have brought up right away, and the topic of your love life gets dropped. That’s probably a good thing.

Vriska’s revelation bothers you. She dated you, another you, and now you’re dead. He’s dead. He’s not you - you’re here, you’re fine, no one ever dug your grave. That’s the best way to think about it. It keeps the confusion away. Vriska’s interesting, but you still have trouble seeing yourself with her in that way, even if dating an alien spider ghost would be kind of cool, just to say you’d done it.

Weeks pass, then months, time ticking by chronologically like it does for most everyone. With your reunion looming, you start to get some jitters. What if they don’t want to be your friends anymore? What if they’ve forgotten you? What if they haven’t, and Rose remembers Karkat’s shipping chart from all those years ago?

You don’t think Rose is expecting anything. She is way too smart to follow orders from an alien. She probably doesn’t even remember. Still, you feel like you’re getting ready for a recital, fingers slippery with sweat and unsteady on the keys. Not sure how you’ll sound, or even who you’re playing for. You remember rising from a sticky mess of your own blood, surrounded by death, reversing the only one you could, and you can’t help thinking that if SBURB asked for true love’s kiss your lips would have no power at all.

You don’t get love, or romance, or any of it. You don’t see that it brought anyone around you any joy. But stories are clear. Stories make sense. Maybe you don’t understand why or how, but they insist that this is key. This is how you get a happy ending. You refuse to imagine your story ending any other way.

So you push a DVD into the machine, press play, and watch carefully. One day you’ll get it. You’re sure.


End file.
